Michael Mann’s operatic 1995 crime odyssey, Heat, has slowly muscled its way into becoming an American film classic, a genre transcender that englobes a state of mind and mood all its own—a journey to the end of Los Angeles night, heavily punctuated with gunfire and murderous stares.

The 20th-anniversary festivities of its release have come and gone, but the hardy bloom of its reputation burst out all over again this May with the release of new DVD and Blu-ray editions (“Director’s Definitive Edition” is how the Blu-ray is formidably touted), and 35-mm screenings at 20 locations. My attachment to the film is aesthetic, professional, and profound, yet personal too—we have a brotherly bond. In the April 2003 issue of Vanity Fair, I wrote a column devoted to Heat and its spectral realm titled “Of Vice and Mann.” Soon after, I received an appreciative note from Michael Mann, inviting me to touch base whenever I was next in Los Angeles. But the Los Angeles opportunity never came, and we never met or spoke . . . until last week, when Mann gave me a ringy-dingy on the telephone to discuss Heat and other pressing matters of state. I hit the “record” button on the Radio Shack tape machine, hoping this noisy artifact from the analog age wouldn’t let me down. It didn’t.

Mann isn’t a doctrinaire reviser of his previous work, someone who simply likes to futz. He takes a provisional, case-by-case approach. “A lot changed on Ali,” Mann says, referring to the director’s cut of his 2001 impressionistic bio-study of world heavyweight champion and history-shifter Muhammad Ali. “A lot of edits. There were scenes that were put in, scenes that were in that I took out. A lot more emphasis as to the politics. I wanted to reshape the film for a much more linear drive and a much more overt sense of a political war waged on Ali. To me it’s Ali’s quest for identity that he finds it in the ‘Rumble in the Jungle.’ ”

The re-edited Ali, released on Blu-ray this year, is also a much more immersive experience than I remember the original being, a movie with the crackle and immediacy of cinema verité while spiked with a top-notch cast that gives it a heightened repertory feel. He also did “major reorganization” in the editing room with the disappointingly received Blackhat, starring Chris Hemsworth as a the world’s hunkiest hacker. The Blackhat director’s cut played in Brooklyn last January, and recently aired on FX.

With other films, Mann has done less re-sculpturing. “I’ve never done anything differently on The Insider, for example. For Heat, I didn’t change much of anything in the edit.” He didn’t need to. Once he visualized the ending of the film, the closing shot of master criminal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and robbery homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) ****hand in hand in mortal kinship, he reverse-engineered the script to that moment of consummation, when the two of them seem the only people left on earth. Mann wanted the viewer “empathetically engaged 100 percent in McCauley’s quest to give up this dissociative doctrine he had and be able to escape, and at the same time make you 100 percent invested in Hanna capturing him. We’re invested in the encounter not happening, and we’re invested in it happening. McCauley passing out of this life with the person he’s closest to is also the person who’s just killed him. It’s setting up layers of opposition, and that’s probably why it sustains in memory—it’s like a truncated fugue.”

If this new director’s edition of Heat is structurally unaltered, visually it’s been made more contemporary. “To make the drama and emotions accessible, I wanted to approach it as if I shot it two years ago. As an audience, we evolve in terms of our relationship to story—but the visual intake, and what these mean dramatically, emotionally, how we’re impacted, all of that evolves the way the medium evolves. If I were shooting this two years ago, there might have been more shadow on the actor’s face, more expressionistic with lighting, less chroma all over the place. Some visuals are quite beautiful; their visual attractiveness takes away the intensity from what’s happening between Pacino and De Niro. It can only be done digitally, it can’t be done photochemically. I can’t get into an image and decide I don’t want to see two eyes, I only want to see one eye, because that’s where the expression’s going to hit.”

Digital filmmaking has also revolutionized night shooting. “When we did Collateral, it was the first photoreal film shot digitally. You cannot capture night photochemically. Very shallow depth of field, very pretty, diffused, defocused lights; exposure-wise, you can’t get that crazy magenta sky you have in L.A., when the sodium vapor lights are bouncing off the marine layer that’s about 1,200 feet at that time of year, and the soft illumination of magenta and orange is very alienating, very attractive, and lonely at the same time. As if the whole movie takes place in Northern Europe someplace.” I mention that the film version of Miami Vice was the first time I ever saw clouds captured in the night sky, a meteorological note of menace. “I know what scene you mean. It was shot 12 hours before a tropical-storm warning. The skies in Miami are Wagnerian.”

I can go on about sheen and surface and photon magic until the gods keel over, so let’s talk content; let’s talk theme. Let’s talk concrete walls, armed watchtowers, and Shawshanks with no redemption. Correct me if I’m mistaken (I’m not), but Michael Mann is the only director for whom prison and incarceration are fundaments of American life, factories that never close and produce generations of hard-bitten cases and damaged goods. Other directors have set scenes behind bars (the memorable opening of Peckinpah’s The Getaway, shot at Huntsville Penitentiary) or entire films (Don Siegel’s Riot in Cell Block 11 and Escape from Alcatraz), but for Mann it has been an ongoing proposition, from his award-winning breakout television film The Jericho Mile (filmed at Folsom Prison) to the HBO series Luck (whose opening scene showed Dustin Hoffman’s Ace Bernstein being processed for prison release) to Blackhat (Hemsworth’s super doing pushups in his cell before being sprung). Even in Heat, where prison is never shown, we’re keenly aware of how McCauley’s crew has been molded and psychologically armored by hard time. From the famous diner sit-down between Hanna and McCauley:

Hanna: Seven years in Folsom. In the hole for three. McNeil before that? Is McNeil as tough as they say?

McCauley: You looking to become a penologist?

Hanna: You looking to go back?

Mann: “It’s quite fascinating because prison’s a laboratory. It’s all compressed and when you compress the human spirit, the psyche, the human soul, geographically, into a prison, it does not diminish. What happens is that the expression is amplified. It’s human nature that if we can’t express ourselves by going out to a bar and having a good time and telling a few jokes, it’ll manifest in something else . . . it’ll become the sharpness of a seam or something ironed into someone’s jeans or tattoos.“

Twenty-eight speaking parts in The Jericho Mile belonged to Folsom inmates, but one autodidact turned down the opportunity to appear on camera, telling the director, “Man, I’m not gonna be in your film because if I was in your film, I’d be allowing you to appropriate the surplus value of my bad karma.” Mann: "He was not doing manufacturing, he was doing time. He would be politically inauthentic. He was being sincere, he wasn’t being glib.”

“DeNiro and I went to Folsom, walk into the yard. One guy came up to me and said, ‘Hi, Mike, how you doin’ today?’ As if we’d seen each other a week ago. It was a guy I’d used in Jericho Mile in 1979, and here we are in 1994. He’s chatting as if we’d seen each other a couple of weeks ago.” It was the armed robber Jerry Scalise, whom Mann used as a consultant on the gangster saga Public Enemies (2009), who explained the nature of Prison Time for Mann.

“Every day’s the same except for one or two days a month when something happens, and what happens retrospectively is that time collapses. It becomes an accordion. So you may have done three years, but there may have been only 24 or 25 eventful days, and that’s what you remember. He was convinced the last time he got out that the stupid way he lived his life was going to end. He had a program, he knew exactly what he was going to do, who he was going to avoid seeing. And ‘they picked me [up] in a car, and I was looking in a rearview mirror as the prison receded into the distance, and it was getting smaller and smaller until it got about an inch high in the mirror. And I said, “Great, let’s score.” ’ ”

Real life incidents like that that make Mann cynical regarding the fashion for redemption stories as the narrative arc in so many prison-related dramas today: ”It’s all bullshit, and it’s not very interesting.”

Redemption will not be wafting through the battle-smoke air of Mann’s next project, a mini-series adaptation of Mark Bowden’s forthcoming book, Hue 1968—a recreative history of the Vietnam War’s bloody, daring Tet Offensive that rattled the faith of America in the military mission. The saga of the long-prepared-for lightning attack on this South Vietnamese city by North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces—and the arduous retaking of the city by Marines and the South Vietnamese army—is told through participants from both sides, providing a ground’s-eye view of the vectors of combat.

Like Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, Hue 1968 is a tour de force of heroic victory-through-defeat and defeat-through-victory that hooks the reader from the opening chapter, which covers the girl guerrillas of the Huong River Squad, and conscripts him or her into a conflict shown through a prismatic lens. Mann calls it “a major, major piece of writing—the best thing Bowden has done—subjectively getting into the minds of every player on every side.”

Mann intends to direct the first two hours of the mini-series, and may co-write some of it. I mention how not only the Tet Offensive but the entire Vietnam War have slid down the memory hole—not for nothing did Gore Vidal call this country the United States of Amnesia—and that people who lament polarization today have no idea what the late 60s and early 70s were like. “Nobody gets it,” Mann agrees. “If they think this is polarization, they should have been on the highways and byways in 1968 and 1970.”

And Mann would know, having gotten caught in a riot which he filmed for the documentary that became 17 Days Down the Line (1970)—a portion of which, an Albequerque riot, appears in Ali. The country seemed much more ready to rip itself raw in two back then, and that was without Trump’s Tony Soprano-ish heavy breathing into every cranny of political life. History, even fairly recent history, is always more savage than we remember.

(Note: A number of Mr. Mann's quotes, garbled by my transcription, have been corrected, along with a couple of factual errors.)